Andrea Dworkin is Dead

[viscousmemories]

This is old news now (she died April 9th), but I just found out about it today.

I would like to go on at length about how much Andrea Dworkin pissed me off, but fortunately a writer at the Boston Globe has already done so for me.

To put it plainly: Dworkin was a preacher of hate. Her books are full of such declarations as, ''Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman." (''Patriarchy," of course, covers contemporary Western societies.) ''Male sexuality, drunk on its intrinsic contempt for all life, but especially for women's lives, can run wild." ''Hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right."

[...]

On some level, Dworkin deserved compassion as a troubled woman with a history of sexual and physical abuse. Unfortunately, she took her battle with her private demons into the public square, and ended up doing far more damage to feminism than any right-wing cabal. (Ironically, some right-wingers eagerly embraced not only Dworkin's antiporn zeal but her argument that sexual liberation has hurt women.) Men, too, have been casualties of a climate in which a Vassar College official could tell Time magazine that a false rape charge might be a beneficial consciousness-raising experience for male students.